Teaching CAD & coding to kids - any experiences/recommendations?

I’ve had somebody asking if there are any resources to teach his kid to do CAD / coding. He said his son is into computers and is interested in becoming an architect.
Has anybody here ever taught CAD to kids (age 10-12 but I guess it could be interesting to hear about experiences with different ages as well)? How easy/hard is it? Did you use Rhino to do that? I imagin sketchup could be a good place to start as it has a simpler interface.

What about coding?

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Hi @siemen! My kid is 12 now and started learning Rhino a year ago. He really likes it but knows his mom is faster than him at modeling so delegates most of the work to her ;-). At school he started learning Sketchup this year, and he got the hang of that pretty fast. Of course, he sticks to building houses and buildings only, but is an easy way to start with 3D modeling. He has recently started learning Unreal Engine on his own. There are many online tutorials and he feels like he’s “designing” a game so he’s very motivated.

As for coding, Scratch is an excellent free resource to start with.

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They have an aggressive ‘Steam’ program at my kids school (11&13), which has them learning Scratch, Inventor and using various types of 3D printing. The robot programing is always popular, the sprk+ by sphero is pretty cool.

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Since we often get school internships (12-16 years old students), I had the chance to teach them a couple of times. Not an easy task, but fun :slightly_smiling_face:

What I quickly noticed is that at least half of them don‘t have fun with CAD,programming or image manipulation. Since I find these 3 activities very fun its sometimes frustrating that most children actually struggeling with this kind of work. But this is quite normal. Its challenging to keep motivation high. But if a child don‘t like it, accept it and don‘t force it. You will notice highly motivated children by doing bonus work and asking question. So it might be a good idea to think in little tasks with bonus objectives.
Another aspect is forcing yourself to keep it very simple. As a professional you will take many things for granted (it sounds obvious, but you steadily trap yourself in overcomplicating it)

I think its more important to finish something, then creating something complex. In terms of Rhino its actually fun to create some sort of abstract form ( a simple spaceship for instance), which then can be printed. Giving a physical output is very important, because it leads to some sort of trophy-like experience. Programming is even more challenging. You won‘t be able to teach something useful at all, unless they are really motivated. Grasshopper as an entrypoint is actually not bad.
If we talk about true programming, its extremely difficult. Games are usually too complex, many loose motivation before finishing anything. Unreal Engine/Unity are way to complex as a starting point.Maybe using „Processing“ for creating a Snake game is a more realistic choice. When I was 15 I used BlitzBasic for a simple 2d game. I made 2d airplane fighter game, and the most challenging, but fun part was programming an homing missile which detects its enemies. That was fun and it worked :slightly_smiling_face: Could be done in Rhino as well.

Another option is to create a little console app, which does some sort pseudo hacking. Maybe using Python and CV2 for webcam activation and edge recognition or simply reading cookies of your browser :slightly_smiling_face: Hacking is kind of a superpower, kids love that :wink:

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Regarding this you can try Construct2. (or 3 but I have no experience with it). It can teach a lot of basic programming without any programming. You can do a lot with the free version. Also teaches about objects, instance attributes, arrays, multi-dimensional arrays, functions, frames in animations, bounding(collision) boxes, etc.

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Hello,

In terms of teaching coding to that age group the BBC reports very good success rates with both girls and boys with the micro:bit.

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What’s about some old-school Logo?
https://turtleacademy.com/

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Considering the aim is to teach both CAD and coding, I honestly can’t think of anything better than Rhino/Grasshopper!

IMO it scales and integrates both worlds like no other. From the very simple to the highly complex, both in terms of geometry and modelling (points, lines, polylines, meshes, curves, surfaces, breps) and computation (Grasshopper, Python, C#). All within an environment that is actually used in industry, as opposed to things like Scratch and Logo. And all within the same package, batteries included (i.e. no need to install both a language and set up an IDE etc. which can super off-putting for newcomers). Of course Rhino isn’t free, but at least you get a 90 day trial.

There’s also plenty of great material out there to start from. I’d personally recommend the O´Reilly course by our own @fraguada. It’s very beginner friendly and I imagine most tech-savy/interested kids would be able to follow it. There’s also the primers: Modelab, Essential Mathematics, Python.

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